Follow the User?!

Data Donation Studies for Collecting Digital Trace Data

Session 4️⃣: Bias & Outro

Frieder Rodewald (University of Mannheim) & Valerie Hase (LMU Munich)

👉 Part of the SPP DFG Project Integrating Data Donations in Survey Infrastructure

Agenda

  1. Bias in Data Donation Studies

  2. What’s Next for Data Donation?

  3. Outro

Image by Hope House Press via Unsplash

2) What’s next for data donation studies?

image of lupe

Source: Image by Markus Winkler via Unsplash

The road ahead I: Advancing the method

  • Multimodal & cross-platform data 📸 (Wedel et al., 2024)

  • In-tool, local classification (e.g., local SML/LLMs?)

  • Workflow/UX-perspective

Image of multimedia data

Source: Image by DariuszSankowski via Pixabay

The road ahead II: Platforms (and data access) as a political tool

  • Platforms do (willingly?) not provide data according to the GDPR/DSA (Hase et al., 2024)

  • The EU has started to sanction platforms like X/TikTok

  • DSA may become the subject of larger geo-political debates with the USA (Seiling et al., 2025)

Image of the Lady of Justice

Source: Image by WilliamCho via Pixabay

The road ahead III: Can we improve and apply the method?

  • Can the method actually be applied for empirical research? (few examples, like Thorson et al., 2021; Wojcieszak et al., 2024)

  • Requires interdisciplinary perspectives (e.g., addressing bias, integration in probability-based panels)

Image of crossroads

Source: Image by Vladislav Babienko via Pixabay

Questions 🤔

3) Outro

image of lupe

Source: Image by Markus Winkler via Unsplash

We want your feedback! 🙃

👉 Please fill out this 3-minute feedback form: https://forms.gle/KLMweywhW7odGyfk8

QR code for survey

QR code for survey

Thanks for joining the workshop 🙌

Quellen

Data Donation Studies - COMPTEXT - Frieder Rodewald, Valerie Hase

Hase, V., Ausloos, J., Boeschoten, L., Pfiffner, N., Janssen, H., Araujo, T., Carrière, T., De Vreese, C., Haßler, J., Loecherbach, F., Kmetty, Z., Möller, J., Ohme, J., Schmidbauer, E., Struminskaya, B., Trilling, D., Welbers, K., & Haim, M. (2024). Fulfilling Data Access Obligations: How Could (and Should) Platforms Facilitate Data Donation Studies? Internet Policy Review, 13(3). https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.3.1793
Seiling, L., Ohme, J., & De Vreese, C. (2025). Wird Europa den DSA in Verhandlungen mit Trump opfern? Tagesspiegel. https://background.tagesspiegel.de/digitalisierung-und-ki/briefing/wird-europa-den-dsa-in-verhandlungen-mit-trump-opfern
Thorson, K., Cotter, K., Medeiros, M., & Pak, C. (2021). Algorithmic inference, political interest, and exposure to news and politics on Facebook. Information, Communication & Society, 24(2), 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1642934
Wedel, L., Ohme, J., & Araujo, T. (2024). Augmenting Data Download Packages – Integrating Data Donations, Video Metadata, and the Multimodal Nature of Audio-visual Content. Methods, Data, Analyses (Online First), 32 Pages. https://doi.org/10.12758/MDA.2024.08
Wojcieszak, M., Menchen-Trevino, E., Clemm Von Hohenberg, B., De Leeuw, S., Gonçalves, J., Davidson, S., & Gonçalves, A. (2024). Non-News Websites Expose People to More Political Content Than News Websites: Evidence from Browsing Data in Three Countries. Political Communication, 41(1), 129–151. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2238641